Sunday, 29 July 2012

One of the most influential members of
Canada’s Olympic team isn’t in London. Instead, he sits in his northwest
Calgary office following the overseas action by computer or television, keenly
glued to the little things that will probably go unnoticed.

Like the way the Canadian women’s
soccer team recovers from one match to the next. Or the way freestyler Ryan
Cochrane “hydroplanes” through the water. Or how the rowers do their thing, the
thing Jon Kolb can’t talk about because “it’s still a secret, and we don’t want
our competitors to know what we’re doing.”

Kolb is the director of sport science,
medicine and innovation for Own The Podium and its uber-secretive Innovation
for Gold program. He helped co-ordinate the plans and projects that helped
Canada finish atop the medal podium at the 2010 Winter Olympics. For the London
Games, as well as the coming Paralympics, Kolb has overseen a dozen projects
aimed at helping Canada finish among in the top 12 medal-winning nations.

He is not here in jolly old England
because, science-wise, he is already working on preparations for the 2014 Sochi
Winter Olympics and the 2016 Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro. Also on the agenda
is a post-London session dealing with boat design – how to make canoes, kayaks,
sail boats and rowing shells go faster in the water while meeting strictly
enforced restrictions.

“Right now we have a $3.5-million gap
in research [funding],” Kolb said of OTP’s future ambitions. (Innovation for
Gold’s predecessor, the Top Secret program, spent $8-million over four years on
55 projects so confidential that anyone involved with them had to sign a
non-disclosure agreement.) “There’s so much more we can do but the funds are
limited.”

The imagination, however, is untapped. Kolb
believes in what he dubs the three pillars: sports engineering, athletic
performance through new training methods and optimizing an athlete’s health.
The London Olympics will be a showcase for athletes’ health.

Cochrane, a bronze medalist in 2008,
competes Saturday in the 400-metre freestyle then doesn’t swim again until Aug.
4. To keep himself primed, Cochrane is moving out of the Athletes’ Village and
taking company with him.

“I’m having our team nutritionist cook
for me,” Cochrane said. “That way I can go to the training facility and have a
little bit of a different life and it might be a good recharge.”

Kolb will be watching how Cochrane
swims in the 400. Given his individual physiology, Cochrane’s stroking
technique allows him to “hydroplane in the water,” said Kolb. “He has a
definite look to his core section when he goes through the water. Ryan and his
biomechanist Alan Wrigley have used that to work on Ryan’s stroke. I sort of
have an eye for that.”

Women’s soccer coach John Herdman has
been equally receptive to new ways, new initiatives in terms of his players’
overall health and recovery. In the months leading up to the Games, the women’s
team trained wearing heart monitors while taking in food and water at specific
times. Everything was driven by the team having to play its first two matches
in just three days.

That aside, OTP is burrowing in on how
to technologically advance the equipment its athletes use. While that’s best
suited to the Winter Games, where athletes compete on snow and ice, Kolb and
his ilk are keen to find those extra 1/100ths of a second that can transform
fourth-place finishers into medalists.

“You’re looking for ways beyond the
human limits. We’re reaching the biological capacity. The way to get ahead is
by the technology and equipment,” Kolb said. “If you’re not at the cutting edge
of performance analyticals – the strain gauge and efficiency of the equipment
an athlete is using – you’re not in the game.”

Again, technological innovation is now
and will continue to grow as central issues in the Olympics.